1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to valves, and more particularly to a variable orifice valve that regulates a flow rate through the valve based upon a property of the fluidic medium, such as, for example, but not limited to its temperature or flow rate, passing through the valve.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Modern electronic systems and devices often require cooling to maintain their operational efficiency. Further, many of these systems and devices are extremely large requiring that only sections or portions of these systems or devices remain operational at any given moment in time. Such systems and devices therefore will require cooling of only the sections or portions that are operational.
Present cooling techniques employ a tank or supply area to receive the return fluid from a cooling system by means of free flow. Such techniques therefore are not efficient since they do not allow direct control of differential flow of cooling fluid into areas of greater need, except by direct valving or orifice control.
Consider for example, an array 100 having four sections such as shown in FIGS. 1A, 1B and 1C. In FIG. 1A, array 100 can be seen to exhibit section temperatures of 50° F. and 200° F. in the upper two sections from left to right respectively; while the lower two sections exhibit section temperatures of 60° F. and 50° F. from left to right respectively. Consider now also a convective cooling system: If a conventional uniform cooling approach is utilized to cool the array 100, only 25% of the coolant may come into contact with the hot 200° F. area, quickly reaching the maximum heat flux of the cooling system. Thus, as seen in FIG. 1B, the hot 200° F. area may cool down to only 150° F. Although better, the efficiency of uniform cooling falls short of the desired results. Consider now instead, a cooling system that directs 75% of the coolant fluid through the hot 200° F. zone, with the remaining 25% used for the other zones. Such a cooling system can be expected to extract heat more effectively. Smart cooling therefore, results in a more efficient transfer of thermal energy to yield the array temperatures depicted in FIG. 1C.
In view of the foregoing background, it would be extremely beneficial and advantageous to provide a system component such as a valve that operates in response to a fluidic medium temperature, thus allowing direct control of differential flow of cooling fluid into areas of greater need to enable gracefully enhanced cooling or heating of highly thermally disparate parts.